Architecture According to Tyler Durden

Whatever Happened to Picking Fights?

Saturday, December 31, 2005

The Delusion and Tyranny of Process

Students are both obsessed and haunted by Process in architectural schools; the most addictive and haunting are processes that are procedural in nature. Some adhere to it as a license to justify a design decision, some hide behind it to absolve themselves of any critical responsibility, some do it because ‘that’s the way this studio works’, so they are told by their process priest, most do it for cool-forms-with-a-simple-mouse-click.

Studio Instructors and Design Tutors preach it to dictate a consistent product at year’s end; to be packaged and published as ‘research’, to further their academic careers and to be used as banana baits for next year’s monkeys. Above all, process is used as a formula that all today’s Playstation Kids can follow, just plug and play. No need to think, no need to teach, just click and produce. The dirty secret these design priests know is that design cannot be taught and to ensure a healthy year-end’s crop- student projects have to be manufactured by proxy.

Friday, December 30, 2005

We are architecture's lost generation

We are architecture's lost generation; raised by Rhino-Max baboons of the 90s. Baboons teaching more Rhino-Max monkeys. Monkey see monkey do. We are architecture's generation that reproduces rather than produces; cursed by perpetual remakes and sequels. More and more form, more and more complex geometry. In the fucked-up world that architecture operates in, all that is of concern for the most avant-garde schools is how do we generate and build these complex surfaces in the most efficient and cost effective way. What the architectural world inherits is a bunch of amnesiac mouse-clicking monkeys. More and more form: my geometry is more complex than yours....cool...

We are architecture's lost generation. Technologically savvy, ideologically impoverished.